A benchmark study of 20 Dutch websites reveals that in the past six months the amount of visits originating from mobile devices has doubled. The study shows that in May 2011 4.3% of total website visits was generated by mobile devices. Six months ago, in November 2010, the observed average for the same sites was 2.16%. If the growth continues at this rate, it is expected that in the first half of 2012 this will be more than 10%. Smartphones, tablets and mobile music players are considered ‘mobile devices’ in this study.

The biggest growth is detected in the use of the Apple iPad and Android phones. On average, the iPad has a 38% share in mobile visits, in November 2010 this was 28%. For phones using the Android operating system, the share in the mobile visits grew from 12.5% in November 2010 to 18% in May 2011.
The top 5 mobile operating systems currently are : iPad (38.1%), iPhone (30.8%), Android (18.1%), Blackberry OS (4.5%) and iPod (4, 1%). SymbianOs and Windows Mobile are now on the sixth and seventh place.

The 20 sites together attract more than 5 million visitors a month and are distributed over various sectors such as news, entertainment, travel, training and e-commerce. This study specifically looked at the visits to the normal websites, the figures are based on the Goolge Analytics accounts of these websites . Obviously these figures will differ from visits to special mobile sites and mobile apps.

Although the number of benchmark sites is set to increase, the published findings are currently not representative of the Netherlands as a whole. Our conclusions should therefore be viewed as observations and trends. This study was conducted by Mobilemetrics.nl, a collaboration between aFrogleap, Netprofiler and RapidSugar.